Wrinkled by time, her face creased into a sad ghost of a smile and lips quavered. Her eyes were misted and watery. Broken. My grandmother folded her thin frame into the overwhelming armchair, barely denting the cushions, and her hands shook slightly as she stirred the weak tea.

‘Well,’ she began, and paused to bring the shaking cup to her cracked lips, ‘why don’t you begin with the date?’
Her eyes appeared to be focused above my head at the stained wall on which hung a photograph of a couple, vibrant in their youth, laughing to the camera. Her pupils were unmoving and unseeing as I carefully wrote the date at the top of the paper, December 14th 2237.

‘Then what?’ I insisted glaring obstinately back at the blank page.

‘Well then just answer the question,’ was her reply. There was a pause and I glanced upwards to see my Grandmother slumped back into the chair, eyes closed.

‘Grandma!’ I exclaimed in alarm.

‘Oh don’t worry child, I’m not dead yet! I’m just thinking,’ she rasped and leaned forwards as coughs wracked her feeble frame. ‘An interesting question you were set,’ she mused aloud, ‘as if that would change a thing,’ she murmured as a defeated afterthought and dozed off peacefully, teacup still in hand. I removed it and drew a blanket across her before stashing the cup in the sink. I sunk into our dilapidated couch with a sigh and unwillingly turned my attention to my homework, which lay rejected on the floor.

‘Alright class, your homework task this weekend is to write at least two A4 pages on which gift you would least and most mind giving back.’ Gift’ meaning sense of course: sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. But we must view them as gifts not yet given but ones we are borrowing, because as you know on your eighteenth birthday one is taken back, stolen from us! You children should make use of your senses now and dread the day of The Taking...’ my painfully thin teacher had rambled for several minutes more but I was no longer listening. She was deemed one of the Tasteless at eighteen and following that she had no will to eat except to survive, food was clay in her mouth. Sodden and tasteless. In this world there seems to be no God, no compassion or mercy because we are all succumbed to the devastating reality by the time we are eighteen. A chemical leakage from a power plant called Chepsko in the early 22nd century, caused poisoned fumes to seep into the air, contaminating our bodies, and our DNA became warped and distorted causing each of us to lose one sense when we turn eighteen. The chemicals were so powerful that eventually they were spread worldwide through water, trading goods and breathing air. People woke up on the dreaded day and found that they could not see, could not hear, could not taste, could not smell or feel. My grandmother said that some went mad because of it, clawing at their features and mutilating their children so they do not have to go through the same pain of loss. If you never experience sight or taste, you cannot be sad when it is taken. Naturally Chepsko was fined and closed immediately, but they never paid the full price for the damage caused, because the effects only showed years after Chepsko had closed and dispersed. In some cases, to lose a sense was to lose a profession, and people slipped into poverty one by one. Some became desperate, the fortunate few hunting the vulnerable, stealing and looting their homes. Grandma told me of the first time a couple sold their infant to The Scientists for research. It had seemed so cruel, bizarre and intolerable back then but now most young couples must make that decision. The Scientists and doctors have laboured for decades to find a pattern, a cure, anything at all. But nothing was found. Some insist that they can find a treatment and stop the evil from commencing, they still have hope in this corrupt world; but I have come to accept my fate.

Resting my chin in my folded arms, I stared despondently out of the window at the early evening scene. A deaf couple, apparently unaware of the incoming car, was strolling along the pavement; entwined in each other’s arms and a huddle of youths were clustering around a lad who was slowly dragging a kitchen knife through his forearm: ‘see! Doesn’t hurt! Can’t feel nothin’ no more!’ he smirked triumphantly. An elderly man sat wide eyed but oblivious to a smudged faced street child tripping down the road, his bursting briefcase clutched in her dirty young hands. Sometimes I envy my Grandmother. She cannot witness the twisted world which we are forced to endure. I attempt to steer my attention towards the discarded papers lying abandoned on the floor. ‘Which gift would you least and most mind giving back?’ What an utterly ridiculous question, to waste what little time with happiness we have, dwelling on the subject and cause of unhappiness. Sight. Hearing. Taste. Smell. Touch. Each one essential, each one valued and cherished. To be a Touchless you could never feel the dependence of a toddler’s cherished hand in yours, to feel the gratitude of wiping away a tear or the overwhelming joy of a long awaited embrace. You could never laugh from a tickle or feel the delicate feet of a butterfly exploring your palm. My gaze floated outside to the teenagers enraptured by their knife wielding friend, whose blood was now spilling onto the paving stones and trickling down the street. This was customary behaviour from the Touchless ones. Everyone would eventually sink into depression, as my father did, and the Touchless would express their hatred for the world with broken glass and silver blades on their senseless skin. I felt bile rising in my throat as the crimson blood mingled between the cracks in the road and I turned away in disgust.
I know what my mother would have said and her transient image wafted in my head: ‘Try to keep sane when the whole world around you is completely mad!’ She tilts her shimmering face towards the light and a beautiful laugh escapes her mouth, so pure and sweet it is, a shame she cannot hear it. Music had been her passion, before the Taking. Grandma told me she had sat for hours as a child in front of the oversized piano which took precedence in their sitting room, music tumbling from her tiny fingers. But although her prodigious talent was not lost, her passion was. On her eighteenth birthday she awoke unable to hear a note, a word, a car horn. She was waving goodbye to me, a grinning five year old, as she sauntered backwards into the road. She signed ‘I love you’ with her special smile, but my child face crumpled in distress as she turned away. ‘Mummy!’ I shrieked, but of course she could not hear my hysterical cries and only heard a hushed silence as the truck smashed into her and left her broken and mangled by the roadside, like an unwanted toy.
My finger traced the frosted window pane as my bottom lip shudders and I blink back hot tears which threaten to spill over. But they cannot be contained and tears stumble down my cheeks, seemingly eager to escape. Burying my head in the pillow, I stifle my hiccupping sobs so as not to wake Grandma. I try to breathe slowly and gulp back the howls which are muffled into the pillow. Breathing deeply my chest slows and I inhale the scent of the pillow. Her pillow. I can still smell her on it, a merge of sweet perfumes which cannot be defined: a hint of nutty almond intermingled with honeydew and pine cones. That familiar, comforting aroma reminds me that I am not entirely alone. If I become one of the Scentless, I could never smell that fragrance again which means a part of her would have vanished into the wind. I would never quite capture the full beauty of a flower, the tangy scent of juice as it escapes an orange or the intense aromatic morning smell of coffee brewing. I would even miss the choking odour of the daily smog which clings to London like a virus and the rarely appreciated, but satisfying scent of the pages of a freshly printed book. Worse would be to become a Tasteless. The Tasteless ones are hollow and wilted because, to them, food is only claylike fuel. Nothing more. They derive no pleasure from eating; only a morbid sense of loss, and therefore do not eat at all in some cases. They cannot experience the crackling of freshly baked bread as you savour the first bite, the fresh juiciness of a tossed summer salad and the sticky sweetness of honeycomb and melted toffee. Tears threaten to emerge as I recall my mother’s favourite home baked raison loaves and her teasing me as I stared at the rising steam, mouth watering. After my mother was gone, my father sank into the bottomless pit of depression. His consistent morbid countenance brought darkness into any room he entered and he threw himself into his work, to find the cure. Then one day he did not come home. His co-workers had said it was an accident, but I knew better. They had found a test tube half full of a mauve chemical in his fist when he lay motionless on the laboratory floor his lips stained purple, dead. Now I am alone in this twisted world apart from my beloved grandmother, who took me in without a word of protest although she had already started to die away quietly.
Unwillingly, I picked up my biro and titled the page but it was as if a cement block was crushing my mind and all thoughts were trapped, but emotions and memories somehow manage to escape unharmed. I furrowed my brow in concentration and considered the Soundless ones. The bluebirds on the blossom trees could not wake you with their uplifting chirping; you could never be comforted by the familiarity of daily sounds like the drip of the tap after a shower. You could never experience the overwhelming beauty of an orchestra of violins, singing together with such perfection it causes tears to stream down your cheeks. You cannot hear the child burglar downstairs, the fire alarm blaring as you sleep peacefully oblivious or the warning shrieks merged with a blaring car horn. A life of silence where you cannot even hear someone say ‘I love you’. But it would be far worse to be a Sightless. You would never experience the sublime beauty of nature as the dripping sun is swallowed by glistening sea. You would never witness a perfectly formed bubble of rain seated calmly atop a leaf, the suffusion of vibrant paints on a canvas or the morning sunlight shafting through translucent leaves. Your broken eyes could never alert you of the knives and thieves which threaten your existence. You could never see the toothless grin on the face of your first child and what once were loved ones become only distant voices. A sudden wave of anguish, frustration and execration for this unjust world overwhelms me. My hand trembled in resentment as I picked up my pen and wrote:
‘‘I would rather die than live a life unseen, unheard, untasted, unsmelt. A life with no feeling, no passion and in a world with no morals, where the fortunate few prey on the vulnerable. A life of powerless existence’